Romanization to Facilitate the Teaching of Modern Hebrew to Adult Native Speakers of English.

Kellogg, E. P., Jr.

Five research projects concerning the Romanization of the Hebrew alphabet and its effect on the progress of adult English speakers learning Hebrew as a second language are reviewed. The hypotheses, subjects, procedures, results, conclusions, and validity of each study are summarized. The studies dealt with the Hebrew alphabet, spelling, plural forms, noun forms, and a measure of language ability. Introducing the learner to Hebrew by means of the Latin alphabet should eliminate the problems involved in learning a different alphabet and set of recognition techniques. Among the difficulties inherent in learning the Hebrew alphabet are that the language is written from right to left and that there are several pairs of identical letters that complicate spelling. A morpheme per utterance measure was developed and evaluated, and appears to be as valid for Hebrew as the mean length of utterance measure is for English. (RW)